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6. Tracking the Theme of Love in Gabriel García Márquez's Narratives

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6. Tracking the Theme of Love in Gabriel García Márquez's Narratives ! Tracking the Theme of Love in Gabriel García Márquez's Narratives Mr. Mandeep Boro Department of English Amirta University Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India ABSTRACT: Novels in Latin America emerge in post independent times when the inhabitants of the continent begin nation building. The entire continent however slips into great political turmoil due to anarchism unleashed by dictatorial regimes. Intellectuals propose that writing novels would save nations and that the more novels that got written the stronger would the nations emerge. These novels have been called as the foundational novels and are premised on romances between white males and indigenous colored women who supposedly “civilize” the “barbaric” through a sacred Christian marriage. Such love stories actually took off from Sarmiento’s Civilization-Barbarism political debates last century and stretched on till mid twentieth century. Garcia Marquez’s love stories take off against such foundational narratives to expose instead the falsity of such myths. This paper proposes to look at three novels to trace how different love stories premised on the social trappings of incestuous relationships as in One Hundred Years of Solitude spanning colonial era to modernity, or racist agenda in colonial Latin America as in Of Love and Other Demons, or of unequal love as in Love in the Time of Cholera explode myths of foundational romances. Key words: García Márquez, foundational novels, Latin American literature. The novel as a literary genre is birthed in Latin America only after the Spanish American wars of Independence. It isn't birthed before because the Spanish Crown prohibited it in her colonies apparently for the fear that it would overexcite the imaginations of the inhabitants and give rise to insubordination. The other reason for which it was banned was the fact that during colonial period reading of fiction was associated in the minds of many people with idleness, addiction to fantasy and search for mental emotion (Lindstorm 78). Nonetheless from the first half of the nineteenth century this attitude of the people changes, novels emerge and finally the narrative occupies an important place in Latin American society as a serious form of expression; it is associated with national consolidation and development or progress of the new nation-states through various themes and stories. These themes or stories were always conjugated on the question of how marginalized elements or the “other” were represented in discourse of the nation. The “other” was the barbarian and was linked to everything related to the inhospitable landscape of the interior, women and indigenous. This thought took off from Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's famous civilization-barbarism political debate. The nineteenth century proposed to resolve this dichotomy with a love story that climaxed with command and control of the “other” through matrimony that legitimized the love story. These love stories which addressed issues of the formation of nation-states through miscegenation and marriage are called foundational fictions, national novels or national romances. This article traces the theme of love first in the foundational fictions/romances in relation with the process of construction or reconstruction of the nation-states in Latin America, then in the Boom and Postboom novels. It proposes to relate it with the narratives of García Márquez by focusing on his three texts: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera and Of Love and Other Demons to Mandeep Boro 1! The Indian Review of World Literature in English Vol. 12 No. I January, 2016 understand how the theme of love changes in these narratives and explodes the myths of national romances. The foundational fictions are the novels written in the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth century. They are called “foundational fictions,” “national romances,” or “national novels” in that these novels were instrumental in molding the national identities of Spanish American countries. The emergence of novel and the process of construction or reconstruction of nation-states in Latin America went hand in hand after the wars of Independence. The main objective of these fictions was to reconcile, unite and constitute a national matrimony between the marginalized and non-marginalized, between the white creole and “uncivilized” indigenous through love stories. The ideal national matrimony was often projected through love story between the whites and Indians. The writers of foundational novels concerned themselves with the question of how to reconcile the opposing elements of civilization and barbarism in order to resolve the internal conflicts of the new nation-states. The political engagement of the foundational novels can be discerned from the fact that many of these writers were political leaders of their country. Writers such as Juan Bosch, Bartolomé Mitre, Rómulo Gallegos were not just writers but also presidents of their respective countries during different period. They wrote because of the fact that they were obliged to depict the ideal national (hi)stories of their countries through novels. They were encouraged and encouraged others to write out of urgency in order to fill a history which would legitimize the recently independent nation-states and for opportunity to direct the national history of their country towards an ideal future (Sommer 76). They presumed that good novels reflected the good conditions of their country, reflected the major achievement of their country, and only a strong nation-state could produce good novels. They postulated that Latin American life would improve substantially once a good number of novels were written; the novels would awaken a deep meditation and healthy criticism in their society; they would teach people about their history, their customs which were hardly formulated then, and the ideas and the sentiments which had been shaped by still unsung social and political events (Sommer 77). For them the narrative and the state complemented each other. However, during that period Latin America was the poorest region in the world in terms of original novelists. Thus the writers of foundational fictions felt and comprehended the burden to write novels out of necessity. The foundational fictions were written according to the literary traditions of romanticism and naturalism. The writers wrote their novels influenced by the ideals of comptean positivism and Enlightenment. They tried to establish through their work a sense of national identity. Hence it is hardly surprising that they dwelt on the indigenous question, the dichotomy of “civilization” and “barbarism” which we see in novels such as Amalia (1851) of the Aregentine José Marmol, Sab (1841) of the Cuban Gertrudis Gómez de Avallanada, Martín Rivas (1862) of the Chilean Alberto Blest Gana, María (1867) of the Colombian Jorge Isaacs, Doña Bárbara (1929) of the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos, and even in Aves sin nido (1889) of the Peruvian Clorinda Matto de Turner. As regards Brazilian novels one can see such tendencies in novels like O guaraní (1857), Iracema (1865) both written by José de Alencar, Enriquillo (1882) by Manuel de Jesús Galván. The protagonists or lovers who suffered unrequited love or whose fates were predestined to end in tragedy in these novels depicted the myth of romance and social realism as foundational and accurate respectively.1 The figure (usually a woman) allegorically represented the nation in those works that did not deal with the theme of reconstruction of the nation-states explicitly, it suggested the path the country ought to follow, it outlined a landscape and local customs to produce a distinct national literature (Lindstorm 79). If we read individually, the foundational novels seem to be very different, not only in the context of space and time but also in regards to social ideals and concomitant strategies. In fact it is difficult to identity communality or similarities of foundational fictions when projects they propose are diverse such as reconciliation, racism, nostalgia, modernization, free commerce, protectionism, etc. Nevertheless, all these projects had a common agenda which was national consolidation and development of the new nation-states. Thus, they are called foundational novels or fictions. For example; in Amalia, José Marmol represents the future of Argentina. The romance (“romance” as a theme and not as a genre) of the elite 1 The term “romance” here does not denote a genre but theme. The romance as a genre is a poetic composition or ballad of Spanish origin, generally consisting of octosyllabic verse. It is derived from juglaresque tradition. Mandeep Boro !2 The Indian Review of World Literature in English Vol. 12 No. I January, 2016 lovers in this novel expresses desire for an ideal state of the nation in which the conflict between “civilization” and “barbarism” is resolved. Eduardo Belgrano and Amalia represent and reconcile opposite or conflicting regions. Martín Rivas intents to mitigate the problems of class division through happy union of Martín and Leonor. Martín, a poor but intelligent and ambitious young man falls in love with arrogant Leonor, daughter of Don Dámaso who is usurer in Santiago. The novel narrates a passionate love story, depicts optimist representation of character of the Chilean nation. Besides, Alberto Blest Gana documents the enormous gap that exists between the haves and have nots in this novel. Aves sin nido insists that the only hope for Peru to achieve future justice is
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